On Mon, 17 Sep 2001, Randy Bush wrote:
The big winners were cable TV, email, packet networks and IM applications. The big losers with cell phones, circuit switching, PSTN, non-akamized news sites.
no one went after the comms infrastructure. when they do, i suspect that we will find the internet is extremely vulnerable.
"Extremely" may be too strong, but certainly "much more than we want". We multihome in The Netherlands and both our transit ISPs connect to the US in the Washington/New York area, with no real backup. I've heard some telcos talk about networks that span the globe, but as far as I can tell, nearly all traffic from Europe to Africa, Asia/Pacific and South America goes through the US. So apparently the cables are there but they aren't used. And even for the US West Coast satellite is a reasonable alternative with just 50% longer RTTs than sea/land based connections.
how many folk even have md5 auth turned on their bgp peering sessions?
How much kerosine can MD5 withstand exactly? But speaking of BGP: what concerns me is the very long timeouts. When a BGP router loses power, it takes minutes for the peer on the other side of the connection to notice something is wrong and reroute the traffic. In the mean time, a lot of traffic has been lost, even though there could have been an alternative path available all along. Fortunately, the power down at 25 Broadway was a controlled one so we didn't have this problem last week.